Fauci Says Trump Got Harebrained Hydroxychloroquine Idea ‘From Laura Ingraham on Fox News’

Former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed on Tuesday that former President Donald Trump got the idea to treat Covid-19 with hydroxychloroquine from Fox News host Laura Ingraham .

Speaking to MSNBC host Ari Melber about his relationship with Trump during his time as one of the lead members of the Coronavirus Task Force, Fauci confessed:

I felt very uncomfortable when he was saying it was going to disappear like magic, it’s just going to go away because he so desperately wanted it to disappear the way flu disappears as you enter the end of the winter and the beginning of the spring. And that’s when I had to publicly get up, which was very uncomfortable for me. I was not happy about criticizing the president or disagreeing with the president. I said, “No, it’s not going to disappear like magic at all.” And when that became clear, that’s when we started talking about hydroxychloroquine, which also was something that had no basis in science.

He continued, “He would start saying things, you know, ‘I care about you, I like you, I love you,’ but then he would start screaming at me, which, you know, it’s not fun being yelled at by the president of the United States. That was a bit unnerving. But I had to continue to tell the truth. And he said, ‘Why do you keep doing this to me?’ Because it’s the truth. I’m telling the American public the facts. Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work.”

On the source of Trump’s obsession with hydroxychloroquine, Fauci said:

I believe he wanted so badly for this to go away the way influenza goes away, and when he saw it was not going away, then he was hoping for some magical solution, and he even used those words, “It’s going to go away like magic.” And then when that didn’t work, then we had to have these miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine, which he got from Laura Ingraham on Fox News.

Ingraham was one of many hosts and personalities on Fox News who promoted hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic despite warnings from medical officials that there was little evidence the drug could treat Covid-19.

During the pandemic, Trump repeatedly promoted the antimalarial drug as a “cure” for Covid-19, and even used it himself in an effort to keep the virus at bay.

In January, however, a scientific study revealed there was an 11% increase in mortality rate among those who used the drug to treat Covid-19. The drug was linked to nearly 17,000 deaths across six countries.

Watch above via Fox News.